Pheroze Kudianavala was born in Vadodara, Gujarat and attended the University of Baroda, where he gained a Diploma in architecture. He appears to have arrived in the UK in 1953, working for a London based practice, before enrolling on the Architectural Association’s six-month post-graduate course within its Department of Tropical Architecture, from September 1956. After graduating, Kudianavala returned to India and in 1960 is recorded as a partner working for the Mumbai practice of Gregson, Batley and King. Four years later he had set up his own firm ‘Pheroze Kudianavala and Associates, Chartered Architects and City Planners’, housed in the Mackinnon Mackenzie Building, in the Ballard Estate, Mumbai. Around 1968 he was appointed architect to the World Trade Centre complex, Cuffe Parade. This prestigious, high-profile project seemingly advanced his career and his consultancy practice rapidly expanded in the 1970s to include branches in Muscat, Oman and Abu Dhabi, where he was to design a 120-bed extension to the military hospital (c1977). By the early 1980s, Kudianavala’s Middle-East branches had apparently been responsible for nearly 2000 consultancy projects, and the practice transformed into a large group of businesses offering consultancy work on engineering, transportation, infrastructure and master-planning projects. Amongst Kudianalava’s most significant built works are over a dozen early skyscrapers in Mumbai, including the Air India Building of 1974, the Reserve Bank of India (1980) and the Videsh Sanchar Bhavan building of c1983.
Sources
- Architectural Association Student Register 1945-1972, AA Archives Department of Tropical Architecture, student listing, Otto Koenigsberger Collection, Box OK27, AA Archives
- Architectural Association Membership List, 1961 The National Archives, UK; Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and Successors: Inwards Passenger Lists; Class: Bt26; Piece: 1301; Item: 98 Pheroze Kudianavala, “Le Corbusier in Ahmedabad,” Indian Builder 7 (April 1959): 14.
- Kudianavala, Pheroze. “Le Corbusier in Ahmedabad,” Indian Builder 7 (1959): 12-18.
- ‘Reserve Bank of India, Mint Compound, Bombay; Architects: Pheroze Kudianavala Consultants’ Indian Institute of Architects Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 1981 Jul/Sep, p. 10-14
- Middle East Economic Digest, Vol. 21, Nos.1-25, 1977, pp31, 34
- Bushan, R. Reference India, Rifacimento International, Vol. 2, 1993, p317
- Williamson, D. Modern Architecture and Capitalist Patronage in Ahmedabad, India 1947-1969, PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 2016, p184
- Pheroze Kudianavala Consultants Pvt. Ltd. V Foreign Exchange Regulation Appellant Board, High Court of Bombay, Dec. 16, 1992. Retrieved 16/02/25 from: https://www.the-laws.com/Encyclopedia/Browse/Case?caseId=312991757000&title=phoreze-kudiyanavala-counsaltant-pvt-ltd-vs-foregianexchan%E2%80%A6
